


What Love Looks Like

by Sintero, Staubengel



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Marvel, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Banter, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Spideypool - Freeform, also Bob Ross, just them being them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:32:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8299982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sintero/pseuds/Sintero, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Staubengel/pseuds/Staubengel
Summary: Part of my 700 followers special on tumblr. For Mizu63 who requested: "The paint's supposed to go where?" with Spideypool. The fic kinda went in a different direction than originally planned, but that's just what happens when Sintero and I write something :'DThank you again to this awesome lady for writing this prompt with me <333





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mizu63](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizu63/gifts).



Peter really liked his advanced photography classes at college, but right now he questioned all of his life choices. Like, he was there to practice  _ photography! _ Not  _ painting! _

But his textbook ‘eccentric art teacher’ was somehow convinced that painting one of your photos made you understand the composition and the colours far better than just analysing it with words, so here Peter was with the most stupid homework he had ever had in his life: transposing one of his photographs onto a canvas. Ugh. Just what the hell?

He had always been somewhat artistic, but only with a camera and maybe a pencil. Not with a stupid  _ brush!  _ The thing did what it wanted and nothing turned out like it should. This was hell and Peter bore a very personal grudge against the tool in his hand.

Wade, on the other hand, seemed to find all of this highly amusing, as he had gotten himself a canvas and a brush as well to create his own masterpiece. The man had even put on Bob Ross to make this whole situation even more absurd. Peter bore a grudge against him right now as well. 

“Now we just need some tiny mountains right up in here,” Wade murmured beneath his breath as he whipped his two inch brush across his canvas like he was practicing his flogging technique. His grandiose gestures wound up sending the paint tubes rolling across the carpet.   

“Ugh, jesus, Wade,” Peter cursed. “I needed that colour.”

“No, what you need is Prussian Blue, not that Cobalt shit you keep slapping on like cologne in a whorehouse,” Wade retorted, adding yet another layer of paint. With two strokes he had an admirable set of happy little mountains in the distance.

“Prussian, Cobalt, whatever the fuck,” Peter grumbled. “This shit all looks the same. And since when do you even know about different versions of blue.” He leaned over, trying to dip his brush in the blue paint on Wade’s palette.

Before his brush ever made contact, Wade whipped his palette away, completely affronted. “Language! And what kind of shit show do you think Bob is running here? You keep your Cobalt nightmare to yourself,” he exclaimed, lips twitching with the force of his suppressed grin.

“I’ll show you Cobalt nightmare,” Peter snarled and ran his brush over Wade’s lower arm. 

“I think my Baby Boy just made a happy little accident,” he admonished with a raised brow.

“No, this was completely on purpose,” Peter announced and turned back to his own canvas. “This looks horrible.”

Wade glanced over with a surprised bark of laughter. “Maybe you should stick to web design,” he teased. Still chuckling, he maneuvered his bulk so that he was able to straddle Peter’s hips from behind, comfortably wedged between his back and the couch cushions. Before the  complaints could begin, Wade reached around and took Peter’s wrist in his own calloused palm.

Peter grunted in annoyance. “If you make me paint a dick on the canvas now,” he threatened, “I’m gonna rip yours off, I swear to God.”

“So feisty. Just relax and let the soothing tones of Bob’s voice wash over you and take your troubles away,” Wade cooed as he nuzzled against Peter’s neck.

“Bob is making me lose it,” Peter muttered. He was the kind of person who got extremely grumpy when things didn’t work out as they planned. Wade’s happiness didn’t detract from his frustration and this fuzz-head on TV certainly made it even worse.

Still, Peter relaxed into Wade’s touch as much as he could manage and let his lover take control of his hand. “If you ruin this even more, though, I’ll throw a fit,” he warned.

Wade rolled his eyes and nibbled absently on Peter’s neck in lieu of answering. He used Peter’s hand as if it were a natural extension of his own, much like his katana. Each stroke of the brush was a practiced choreography of give and take that fed off of the feedback between textured canvas and bristle. Distant buildings sprang to life in a matter of a half dozen lazy strokes. “The joy of wet on wet painting is that you can blend right on the canvas,” he explained with a soft exhale.

“The joy of photography is that I can picture exactly what I want to without having to frustrate my ass off,” Peter countered. “And if that clown says ‘happy’ one more time, I’m gonna throw something at the TV.”

“Yeah, but with photography you’re just taking a snapshot of what’s already there. This shit lets you create something new. It lets you show the feelings and thoughts that are trapped beneath that stupid hair of yours,” Wade continued unabated. He dabbed the brush against the palette with their combined hands and began to commit the birds’-eye view of New York traffic to the canvas. Frantic streaks of yellow and red blurred about the edges with equally harried brush strokes. The wash of color quickly came to life as something more than mundane cars passing in the encroaching dusk, echoing both Peter’s and the driver’s frustrations.

“But I’m not creating anything here,” Peter continued to whine. “I am reproducing a perfectly fine photograph. This is bullshit.”

Wade spread his thighs wider and pulled Peter back until there was no space between them. His thick arm stayed looped around Peter’s waist. “If you were to take a picture of us right now, what would you see?” he asked idly as he rested his chin on the shoulder before him and continued to give the grayed out cityscape vibrancy.

“You doing my homework for me?” Peter quipped. Then he sighed and tried to picture the situation as an outsider. “I think I would take it from over there,” he mused, gesturing over to a spot diagonally to his left. “So that the focus is on us and the canvas can only be seen from behind. What we’re painting wouldn’t be important, the picture would be about the act of painting itself and how we do it. About us. The window would give some backlight which would make the whole scene appear more warm and comfy. Also, luckily, the photo wouldn’t have any sound, so no one would hear those stupid happy-little-rocks comments coming from that hippie over there.”

“Mmm, sounds nice. So how would your picture show the warmth that you’re totally leeching off of me right now?” Wade asked idly.

Peter hummed lowly. “Like I said, backlight,” he replied. “Also colours. Warm pastel, maybe a tiny bit blurred. Just slightly, to make the contours smoother.”

“How about the struggle between the rage that you don’t realize you’re channeling into my brush and me using all of my, admittedly impressive, strength to resist it?”

This time Peter only grunted and tried to relax his hand. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just really hate this.”

Uneven splotches from their silent struggle formed distant windows in purple and blue. “You didn’t answer my question,” Wade sing-songed in response.

Snorting, Peter leaned against him and placed his arm over Wade’s. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It would ruin the harmony of the picture, I think. I would leave it out.”

Humming, Wade sucked softly at the spot that he had been nibbling earlier. “Interesting choice. And how would you tell the story of how that super strength was really fucking hot and is doing things to my bathing suit area that aren’t suitable for mixed company?”

In a handful of brush strokes, the mirror-like windows of a skyscraper in the foreground reflected the last rays of the setting sun in an array of reflected light that teamed with warm sensuality.

Peter shuddered softly and unconsciously pressed himself back against Wade harder. “Taking another picture,” he stated, his voice a bit more tense than before. “One that I would keep hidden in my nightstand because it’s not suited for anyone’s eyes but ours.”

“So you would have to take two pictures to get all of that? How about the fact that when I look at you I can see forever in your smile? How many more pictures would that take?” Wade added a few soft, even strokes to flesh out the endless sky.

“Did you just go from ‘I’m so turned on, let’s fuck’ to ‘cheesy lines straight out of a teenage romance novel’ in under a minute?” Peter countered. 

“I’m a complex man, Baby Boy,” Wade stated with a gravelly laugh. “How many more pictures?”

“I don’t think I could grasp that in a picture,” Peter replied. “Some things just can’t be made visible.”

“Funny, I think I did just that,” Wade retorted as he set down the painting supplies and sat back with Peter held tightly in his arms.

The painting was finished.

In the tone and texture of each stroke a story unfolded. The aerial view of a New York cityscape gave way to curling suggestions of emotion that didn’t so much form a true reproduction of building facades as they did recount a dynamic burst of intimacy in Wade and Peter’s shared apartment. The painting was a suspended moment in time that, when studied closely, spoke of far more than a simple image.

“That’s really nice,” Peter acknowledged after a moment. “But it’s not as beautiful as the feeling of being told ‘I love you’ by you or giving myself over to your passion. And, by the way, this is also not what I need for my homework.” He patted Wade’s arm and aimed with his brush to leave a dot of paint on the tip of his lover’s nose. 

“Everyone’s a fucking critic,” Wade pronounced then buried his laughter in Peter’s shoulder.

Peter had to laugh as well. As always, Wade had managed to cheer him up simply by being his ridiculous self. 

“But not everyone’s an artist,” he claimed as he squeezed Wade’s arm. 

“Tell you what,” he then hummed in a completely different tone and wiggled his body until he had managed to turn around in Wade’s embrace. Wrapping his arms around his boyfriend’s neck, he leaned his forehead against Wade’s and licked his lower lip. “We’ll see how a painting of us being fucking hot and in love looks by taking the paint to the bedroom and using a much larger canvas with our bed sheets. I’m sure whatever comes out of this will be a masterpiece worth being hung up in the Louvre.”

“Petey, Cadmium Yellow will give you cancer,” Wade chided with faux seriousness, though the effect was hampered by the lingering splotch of blue on his nose. “Let’s get the whipped cream instead.”

“Mmmh, someone’s hungry,” Peter stated and softly bit Wade’s lips. “How about we get the ice cream too. And do we have chocolate sauce left?”

Wade kissed him back lightly, just the press of chapped skin. “Probably. Too bad we both lost our cherries, otherwise I’d say let’s make a sexytime sundae.”  

Peter laughed once more and shook his head before he planted another kiss on Wade’s lips, long and tender. “I love you, you idiot,” he whispered and kissed him again. “And I don’t care what that would look like, as long as I know how it feels.”

“Fuck,” Wade breathed out like a prayer. “Love you too, babe.” He cupped the back of Peter’s head with one broad palm and deepened the kiss until the need for air exploded behind his eyes in vivid splashes of black, blue, and red.

Maybe that was what love looked like.


End file.
